ABSTRACT
Citizenship has become both liquid and monitorial, which, embedded into a consumerist context, has transformed the everyday into a legitimate site of political expression, as encapsulated in the notion of lifestyle politics. Liquid citizens are connected to all sorts of places and perform a large variety of multi-directional and episodic activities; monitorial citizens voice their concerns and claims on an episodic basis, when their personal centres of interest are at stake (see Chapter 1). This chapter discusses how boundaries between public and private spheres have started to gradually blur under the influence of enhanced mobile technologies and established social media practices. In everyday conversation, the topic of politics often arises from the mundane and, as with most other topics, primarily serves a social, rather than primarily political, function, that is to maintain good relations and one’s social status. Political self-expression in the everyday as such emanates from the private sphere and is thus highly reliant on personal experiences. Due to blurred boundaries online, these experiences subsequently come to constitute shared common spheres. As an example of how established (visual) practices online may take on a political dimension and how public and private spheres merge, this chapter briefly discusses how citizens’ selfies as a private xxexpression in political contexts (e.g. during elections) may perform both social and communicative functions and create performative and spectatorial intimacies through a sense of proximity. Finally, we will see how a form of eye-witnessing when shared online in political contexts may become a form of saying, and how bearing witness to political events may become a form of civic participation.
